Rant 1031 / 360 Crop Rotation

Nitro boost - 19mph - 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS

Buy Farming Simulator 2011 now and get pussy all night!

And I love the title of the video.





















Here's an awesome alternative to an upper limb workout: go shop for half a week's worth of groceries in a single trip without using a trolley.


Bought from the vegetable stall that was less crowded but provided printed receipts for purchases. It's the only stall that does it and it helps me get used to the prices of vegetables at the market.

What I bought today:

Cai xin (Cameron) - 0.585kg X $3 = $1.76
Spring onion - 0.13kg X $5 = $0.65
HK veg - 0.27kg X $6 = $1.62
Kailan local - 0.59kg X $3 = $1.77
Garlic bulbs $0.80
Japanese sweet potatoes - 0.855kg X $3.90 = $3.33
Dutch potatoes - 1.355kg X $2 = $2.71
Onions - 1.03kg X $1.50 = $1.55

Total $14.20

"Cameron" probably refers to the vegetable farms in Cameron Highlands, Malaysia. The spring onion was only 1 large stalk, hence the weight. "HK veg" refers to baby bak choy aka 上海白菜. Garlic bulbs came in 5 bulbs per bag, $0.80 per bag.

These should cover at least 3 days. Couldn't buy more because vegetables, unlike meat, can't be frozen.

Chicken breasts were $2 apiece and I bought 10 as usual, with bones removed and separately packed (for soups).

Finally, eggs. I asked the vendor for their largest chicken eggs and they cost $3 for 10. Bought 20 but didn't get a discount :(

Got back home, placed everything in the fridge with help from my bro.

Also had to split the breasts into multiple reusable plastic containers as usual. These don't last a week; sometimes they only last 5 days. Pan-fried (I just discovered pan-frying is different from saute) chicken breasts are awesome with just a little salt, pepper and some random herbs like basil or rosemary. Or just garlic and salt.



Then I went back down, initially to Shop N Save just because it's Saturday ie 3% cashback, but I thought it was so early the char siew stall had to be opened.

8am and the queue took forever to move. Although there were only about 7 people ahead of me, a few of them were making large orders that filled like 2-3 large boxes. The stall not only sells good char siew but also roast pork, roast duck and pipa roast duck.

While char siew was only $23 per kg, the pipa roast duck was $30 per duck, and the ducks aren't boneless.

The 1kg of char siew was a big purchase relative to my budget hence it was my only purchase from the stall. This time I asked him the slice them and remove the burnt ends. Can't always have those all the time.

This char siew covers our entire day's meals. That's my plan for today anyway. Might have to use the sweet potatoes somehow to cover the fibre intake. Depends on how lazy I feel later. Steaming them is easy but making a dessert out of them is more interesting.

After that I bought some rock sugar for my sweet potatoes from one of the Chinese pharmacies, $1.10 for 400g.

Of course I didn't forget the trip to the supermarket, but this time I bought just 3 packets of pasta and a large jug of milk. Those were the only things I couldn't get from the wet market that I needed.

...

Ok the char siew wasn't such a good idea after all. I should just stick with 500g next time, maybe 600g at most.






















While playing Evochron, it came to me that when spaceflight becomes common enough like in the game, there's going to be a need to define the X,Y and Z planes to standardise the alignment of ships.

Y'know, the make life easier when communicating to each other. For example, you can't define port and starboard until you know which plane you're talking about. In seafaring, this is easy because there is only one plane you can control, resulting in port, starboard, acceleration and deceleration.

But in spaceflight, just like for our aircrafts, not only can the vehicles control their yaw, pitch and roll, there is no real up, down, left or right in a weightless environment.

To control traffic, the authorities must standardise the definition of all axes the same way SI units are defined. I think they can use the axis going through the Earth and the Sun plus two imaginary axes perpendicular to each other, but what about residents outside of Earth?

The US has already shown how something as small as an ocean will make a people want to use different sets of units for everything. With the distances involved in space travel, that's practically guaranteed!

And it's going to be funny how you can tell where each spacecraft came from just by looking at the angles they are at on each plane as they move in space, mostly in the longitudinal axis, unless space travel evolves in a different direction than expected.

For example, if it turns out that we will build space ports to launch spacecrafts from, the ships may not be designed to have streamlined bodies. What's the point of aerodynamics in vacuum?

Learning from sea travel, such spacecrafts may have smaller shuttles that have a more conventional design to transport people and objects from the ships to planet surfaces while they "anchor" just outside of the atmospheres.

If so, it's going to be hard to tell which direction a spacecraft is really facing. Heck, such a ship can have neither "front" nor "back", and it can have cameras outside so the cockpit is well protected in the center of the ball-shaped vehicle. Windows are, after all, a structural weakness, and in the darkness of space, there is no need to see anything with your naked eyes. In fact, having no windows can help protect space travellers from radiation over long journeys.








So I'm starting to get the hang of the game after finding this map for the game.

Things to do in the game later when I'm really comfortable with it and ready to waste some time doing meaningless activities:

1) Enter a star
2) Explore a nebula
3) Enter a black hole

I'll think of more later.

I've never been satisfied with the space travel in the Mass Effect games just because I can fly through stars. Let's see what it's like in Evochron.






....





Ok it's a rather slow game like Warband. Fortunately the game continues to run while I alt-tab out of the game so mining is simple.




...


Entered a nebula. Wasn't worth the effort. I went to the station within and it didn't sell anything special. Moreover, the nebula's constant electrical storm prevented me from jumping out, so I had to fly out slowly at around 570m/s, my top speed.

Didn't find anything either, and the asteroid field nearby gave me nothing. Without a fuel converter, I couldn't convert the energy from the nebula into fuel, so it was just an educational trip that taught me not to bother exploring nubulae for the time being. Maybe in the future when I can go to the less explored areas, there might still be treasures in those nebulae for me to discover.



...




The star was less spectacular than expected but just as scary just because of its gravity. When I got close enough to convert its radiation into fuel with my newly bought fuel converter, even my maximum thrust was unable to significantly slow down my velocity towards it.

The closer I got the greater its gravity, and when I got too close, I simply exploded. Good thing it didn't prevent jumps like the dense nebulae did.

























Ok I didn't expect to have to pay for insurance for my shoes at ComGateway but they charged me US$0.55 for it in addition to the fuel surcharge of US$3.66 and the original shipping charge of US$25.25 for the 3lb-package.

Fortunately, my DBS card gave me a small discount of US$2.53 and $10 of credit which I redeemed immediately, resulting in the final shipping charge of US$16.93.

Visa's exchange rate today inclusive of 2% foreign transaction fee is 1USD to 1.278672SGD, giving me the price of S$21.65.

The shoe had cost me S$77.56 (exchange rate of 1USD to 1.293744SGD) so the total price for this pair of shoes is S$99.21.

Wasn't really that cheap but it's going to be delivered right to my doorstep.


Meanwhile, I learnt that my suede shoes have EVA soles. EVA is supposed to be pretty good because it's light and is a good shock-absorber. I was only trying to see if it could last but few mention its durability, although those few did describe it positively.
























Read MacArthur's escape from the Philippines in WWII. When I saw the title, it felt like cowardice. A general running away from a hopeless defence? Isn't that like a ship captain bailing from his sinking ship?

The truth is counter-intuitive, I guess.

The main reason is that holding an enemy 4-star general as a POW is only slightly more epic than getting a royal flush in an international poker tournament.

Nobody but snipers should kill enemy officers in war, and whoever shoots a general when it's possible to capture him deserves to be shot for doing so. Not only is a general a big trump card in POW-exchange negotiations, he is also a treasure trove of military secrets. The strategic value of capturing a general is incalculable.

That's what I think anyway.

Which is why when they killed Osama bin Laden immediately upon finding him, it probably meant that he wasn't really a major leader anymore, and might have been little more than a symbol for his side in the war. Kinda like the idea of capturing the White House in games - demoralising but ultimately of little strategic value.